Between worlds and elites at the beginning of the Early Bronze Age in the Lower Danube Basin: a pluridisciplinary approa
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(2020) 12:213
ORIGINAL PAPER
Between worlds and elites at the beginning of the Early Bronze Age in the Lower Danube Basin: a pluridisciplinary approach to personal ornaments Frînculeasa Alin 1 & Garvăn Daniel 2 & Mărgărit Monica 3 & Bălășescu Adrian 4 & Lazăr Iulia 5 & Frînculeasa Mădălina Nicoleta 6 & Soficaru Dorian Andrei 7 & Molnár Mihály 8 & Georgescu Migdonia 9 Received: 26 November 2019 / Accepted: 7 August 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The territory situated to the north of the Lower Danube represents the ideal space for observing the interaction between local communities, local environment and newcomers who arrived here at the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC. Thousands of burial mounds and relatively few flat graves present an array of common or exceptional inventories, indicating a very dynamic society. Among these grave inventories, the ornaments, beyond their primary symbolism (religious, social, cultural), generate important information which, properly exploited and systematically treated, allows the exploration of social practices in the context of the development of elites in prehistory. This study highlights the results of pluridisciplinary investigations (anthropological, isotopic, metallographic, technological, traceological, malacological and archaeozoological) of the ornaments discovered in a grave of the Early Bronze Age (the first third of the 3rd millennium BC) from Șoimești, Prahova County, with the richest inventory in Romania. The exploration of various aspects, such as the variety of basic materials used (animal teeth, molluscs, metal), ornamental forms and settings, their large number and their distribution in the burial space, allowed for interpretive assumptions about the deceased individual’s relation with the environment (through the fauna in the grave), and cultural and social identity (including status) analysed from different spatial perspectives, including the Lower Danube, Carpathian Basin and the North Pontic steppe. Keywords Ornaments . Pluridisciplinary analysis . Grave . Șoimești . Romania
Introduction Since the end of the 5th millennium, the Lower Danube valley was the setting for the arrival of cultural elements specific to the steppes (Anthony 2007) from the northern region of the Black Sea, a phenomenon that persisted throughout the 4th
* Frînculeasa Mădălina Nicoleta [email protected]
millennium BC. The last third of the 4th millennium and the first half of the next millennium mark the appearance of earth mound burials (kurgans) in the area. These visible funerary monuments specific to Yamnaya/Pit Grave communities customized the archaeological landscape of the Lower Danube Plain areas (Frînculeasa et al. 2015, 2017; Kaiser and Winger
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Faculty of Geology and Geophysics, Department of Geology, University of Bucharest, 6 Traian Vuia Street, sector 2, 020956 Bucharest, Romania
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Faculty of Humanities, Department of Geography, University Valahia of Târgoviște, 35 Lt. Stancu Ion Street, Târgoviște, Romania
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